I am a red-green colourblind artist. It does not mean I see no red or green or anything in between. It means they often blend optically for me when they sit next to each other. So my colour runs on a different pair of rails. Reds and greens do not stay apart; they slide into the same track, and the forest floor turns into one continuous tone. Colour reaches me as energy, vibration, feeling. I probably take bigger leaps across the spectrum than a colour-accurate artist would, only it takes more force to land on my eye. I call that chromatic pressure: building the work from intensity and texture rather than accurate or realistic hue. The longer account of chromatic pressure sets out the full thinking.
How my perception works
I am useless at picking lingonberries, and worse at finding chanterelles. Neither one is really about picking. Both are about seeing. Deuteranopia is the medical name for the red-green colourblindness I have. The eye runs colour on two opposing pairs, red against green and blue against yellow. Mine sits on the first pair, so reds and greens, lingonberries and chanterelles, get swallowed into the mid-tones of the forest floor. They lose their edge against everything around them. The pointillists trick the eye into mixing carefully placed pure pigment; the forest does the same to me, only on a far bigger scale. My grandmother navigated it for me and led me to her secret spots deep in the Swedish forest. Little Kalle did not have to come home empty-handed, but with a basket full of "skogens guld". I cannot promise the same to any grandchildren of my own.
Colour is reflection. Light hits a surface, some of it comes back, and your eye reads what returns. The red of the lingonberry comes back to me as surely as it does to anyone; what I lose is the fine separation between it and the green it sits against. The colour is there. The boundary between it and its neighbour is the part I cannot pull cleanly apart, and it only comes clear when I get close enough for the two to stop overlapping. It is like a radio holding two stations on almost the same frequency. The lingonberry is transmitting. I just cannot split it from the green next to it until I am right up against it.
Colour theory can point out what works for the average eye. It cannot tell you what it is to compose a piece from the channels that stay sure while the red-green axis keeps shifting under you.
How do colourblind artists see colour?
I think of colour through relationships rather than names. Names work for things we all share through a common structure: that is a house, that is a chair, that is a ball. But ask anyone what ultramarine blue is and it gets slippery, because we all see colour a little differently. Your blue is not my blue, even from the same pigment. My favourite colour happens to be ultramarine blue (PB29). It pulls me in and holds me. Yves Klein is one of the most influential artists of our time, and plenty of people still feel nothing for his work. His Klein Blue is simply not their blue. To me it is electric, resonant. If Klein had grown fungi instead, I would happily have been his truffle hog.
Mid reds and greens blur into mud for me. My optical mixer cannot handle the information, so it blends them into a brown tinted by whatever happens to dominate. I read a surface by its light instead, its contrast, its blue-yellow charge. I often begin a piece in monochrome value and bring colour in later. Colour confuses me, and I love that about it. It is mysterious, and like any waveform, amplified it vibrates with energy. Colour is sensory. It is not for the eyes but for the soul, the gut, the small hairs on your neck. So I take bigger leaps across the spectrum and build the work from how it feels.
Modern colour theory changed how I work
In my forties I started reading about modern colour theory, and something opened. The system I had been taught, red and yellow and blue as the three primaries, had never sat right with me. It is an antiquated, non-scientific way in. It mixes a smaller, muddier range, and it asked me to trust my eye in exactly the place my eye gives out.
Modern colour theory handed me a way into colour through something other than colour. Through light. Through behaviour. Through how surfaces meet and how that meeting bends what you see. I could reason about a colour from how it acts rather than from a hue I cannot pick up. That moved me from guessing to building.
Do colourblind glasses work?
People ask me this more than almost anything, and usually with real kindness. Would a pair of those glasses let me see what everyone else sees?
Filter glasses of the EnChroma kind can lift the contrast between colour pairs for some people with milder colour weakness, by cutting out a slice of overlapping wavelength. They do not rebuild a cone response that is missing or shifted, so for deuteranopia they reach partway at best.
They also assume colourblindness is a fault to patch before the real work starts. For me it is the instrument. Correcting it, if I could, would take away the very thing the work is built on.
I work from how it makes me feel.
Why my work runs loud
This is just how I work, and it is not really a choice. I cannot lean on a subtle shift of hue to carry a piece, so I reach for colour that arrives already meaning something, and let gradual contrast do the structural work. I push pigment, surface, and structure until the surface holds that charge. The vividness is the working showing through. Colour reaches me as energy before it reaches me as fact.
The work moves in cycles: macro photography, making by hand and on screen, generative loops. Those steps recur and reorder. Not every piece uses all of them, and not every piece lands on pigment ink on paper, though many do. The paper matters too, because where a colour meets a particular surface, and the light coming off it, is where the charge lives.
Melancholy dipped in sunshine
FIGURES is where I come back to people. Not realism or likeness, but emotional resonance. There is warmth in the work, and it does not erase the bruise. It makes the bruise liveable. Tenderness and force held in the same space, neither one cancelling the other. That is what the series is for, and it is about as close as I can get to saying what colour, used this way, is actually doing.
How other colourblind artists handled it
Colourblindness is common. Around 1 in 12 men (about 8%) and about 1 in 200 women (about 0.5%) have some form of it, within the western reference population. So being colourblind is not what sets my work apart. What is mine is what I built from it: the way of composing, the term I coined for it, and the body of work that records it.
Most colourblind artists who left a mark went the other way from me. They stepped back from colour, or worked around it. I went into it.
Charles Méryon, the French artist, had a red-green colour deficiency and gave up painting because of it. He turned to etching and became the major etcher of nineteenth-century France, working in black and white, building everything from light and dark. Colour was not reliable for him, so he set it aside and made its absence his medium.
Peter Milton, the American printmaker, found out he was colourblind in his early thirties. He left colour behind and has worked in black and white ever since. Franco Grignani, the Italian designer, kept working in colour but checked his choices with collaborators, working around the condition rather than from it.
I sit on the other side of all of them. Méryon and Milton stepped back to monochrome. Grignani worked around it. I keep colour at the centre and let the condition decide how I use it: colour as energy, not accurate hue. The colourblindness I share with a lot of people. Making it the engine is the part that is mine.
There is a way of framing this that I keep coming back to. Julie Capiaux, a French graphic designer, wrote (Re)Vision, a thesis that separates a constraint a person suffers from a constraint a person integrates. Her suffered examples are Monet, whose cataracts altered the colour of his late work, and Louis Wain, whose illness changed his. Neither was colourblind. The integrated kind is the other thing: a limit turned into an engine. She places my work there. That is the line I would draw too. The limit is not something I got over. It is the reason the work exists.
Kalle Hellzén is a Swedish visual artist based in Stockholm and founder of Atelier Kalle Hellzén.
Thesis: (Re)Vision by Julie Capiaux. Hosted with permission. Credit: Julie Capiaux.
For the lived account, how the diagnosis came, the choices that came with it, and the materials and process it produced, the longer essay on working from colour blindness carries the full story.